Birth of a Linux-Distribution

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Monthly Archives: February 2012

Last week i stumbled upon a interesting project: The liberation of the Debian Administrator’s Handbook. The goal of the project is described best with their own words:

Liberate the Debian Administrator’s Handbook

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook has been written by two Debian developers who are keen to share their knowledge. Accessible to all, this book teaches the essentials to anyone who wants to become an effective and independent Debian GNU/Linux administrator.

It covers all the topics that a competent Linux administrator should master, from the installation and the update of the system up to building packages and the compilation of the kernel, but also monitoring, backup and migration, without forgetting advanced topics like SELinux setup to secure services, automated installations, or virtualization with Xen, KVM or LXC.

Since KDE SC 4.7 transition ist still blocked in Debian, preventing 4.7.4 moving from experimental to unstable, this leaves unstable users with an unsatisfying KDE SC 4.6.5. For our first release, we had used the debian-qt-kde repository, which at the time had KDE SC 4.7.2. Soon after, KDE SC 4.7.4 got uploaded to experimental. Instead of also updating the qt-kde repo, it was emptied and is dead in the water at the moment. The god thing about the qt-kde repo is, that it needs on very basic 3 lines of pinning.

As things look right now, we will see KDE SC 4.7.x in Debian 7 Wheezy. As the freeze for that is not so far away, that could mean, that KDE SC 4.8 will not enter any debian repo for a while, because in freeze RC-Bugs have priority. Even though 1 guy is working on KDE SC 4.8, there might not be enough time and manpower, once freeze hits us.

For a user to use KDE SC 4.7.4 from debian experimental, user needs a preferences file, pinning every package, resulting in a list as long as my arm. To resolve the situation, we have decided to set up a repository calles kde-next, which, at the moment, holds the KDE SC 4.7.4 packages. Adding this repo to your sources.list.d will update your kde-version to KDE SC 4.7.4 with your next dist-upgrade. No need for pinning. The upgrade from KDE SC 4.7.2 to 4.7.4 is, as can be expected, a breeze. Should you want to upgrade from KDE SC 4.6.5, or – behold – even older, please be careful and read what apt wants to do.

The lines to add are:

deb http://packages.siduction.org/kdenext unstable main

deb-src http://packages.siduction.org/kdenext unstable main

After an apt-get update your package-manager is introduced to the repository and you are good to go.

What’s new?

a huge stack of smaller improvements making it more flexible, easy and fun to use

What’s included

3.0.0 includes 24 new features and 15 bugfixes over 2.7.0. It includes all bug fixes and features of the 2.7.0 release.

What’s next?

This is the first release in the 3.x series which will be fully supported with monthly bugfix releases until the next major ChiliProject version which is due around July 2012. The big goals for that major release are the upgrade to Rails 3.x and the further modularization of ChiliProject.

I had myself a jolly good time yesterday, when writing an essay named ” Parting of the Ways – The Birth of a Distribution”, which of course tells the story of how we set up siduction from point zero. It will be printed, together with an introductory article to siduction, in next months Linux-User Print-Magazine in Germany.

To be able to be precise about how things fell in place, i had to read all the “old” material scattered over forums, blogs, wikis and IRC-logs. Took a couple hours but was a good read, as i was reassured that we created exactly what we wanted right from the start. Feels good to reread that.

Other than that, the polish translation of the Bluewater Manual went online the other day, while italian and greek are being worked over. The artteam, which is at the moment rather an art-guy (se7en) and one or 2 people that help out sometimes, needs fresh blood. Over time, putting this on the shoulders of one person is not gonna work out. As we see distro-art as an important part of the package that can’t be neglected, we need to find more artsy people. Is that you? Don’t hesitate, join us now!

And last, not least, my mantra these days is: Lets make siduction a little bit better every day. 🙂